[A picture from the play "While I Was Waiting". July 2017. Image by Sara Krulwich via the New York Times.]

English

Mashrou’ Leila and the night club’s political power
On a recent breezeless afternoon, I met two young Saudi women sitting on the grass outside the Prospect Park Bandshell, in Brooklyn. They were wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the logo of the Lebanese alternative-rock band Mashrou’ Leila, and they were snapping selfies where the band was scheduled to headline at the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival later that evening.

Can Arab Artists Survive?
Can Arab artists survive the shrinking space for freedom of expression in many of their home countries? Can they survive the difficulty of finding a place to work with colleagues? Can they survive being endlessly turned down for visas? Can they survive the risk of becoming like a luxury brand name for collectors, a Rolex watch, instead of helping the wider public open their eyes, hearts, and brains? Those were some of the questions at the center of an all-day symposium held recently at the British Museum on the “Survival of the Artist.”

What if we let it up to Arab artists to be the ones to tell their (hi)story?
In the past few years, Arab aesthetics have been omnipresent in fashion, cinema, photography and music. For Arab creatives, this felt like a source of pride and the hope for greater visibility, at first. Till the day they realized Western creatives were covering those projects solo. With Ilyes Grieb, Moroccan photographer and recent victim of plagiarism, we decided to talk about this reality.

What a novel can say about the Egyptian revolution
In 2016, five years after the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian government decided to alter public mentions of the 2011 revolution. It omitted names of activists from grade-school textbooks, and downplayed the mass protests in some high-school texts.

Abdo Shanan’s Algerian Photographs
The photographs in Abdo Shanan’s series “Diary: Exile” (2014–2016) take viewers by the hand and race them through a vertiginous world of gritty, everyday intimacies.

Mashrou’ Leila release music video for Roman
The video self-consciously toys with the intersection of gender with race by celebrating and championing a coalition of Arab and Muslim women, styled to over-articulate their ethnic background, in a manner more typically employed by Western media to victimise them. This seeks to disturb the dominant global narrative of hyper-secularised (white) feminism, which increasingly positions itself as incompatible with Islam and the Arab world, celebrating the various modalities of Middle Eastern feminism.

Video: Activists team up with Mashrou’ Leila to detox Beirut’s plastic binge
Amid an ongoing waste-management crisis, the Lebanese government is now directly dumping rubbish into the sea, making it impossible to swim safely anywhere along the coast this year… On Saturday, more than 250 activists taking matters into their own hands led a collective clean-up along one of Beirut's last non-privatised beaches, enlisting the help of Lebanese alt-rock band Mashrou' Leila.

A play about Syria as a country in a comaWhen one’s entire life is spent waiting, how does one measure the time? In the play “While I Was Waiting,” which on Saturday wrapped up a run as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, Omar (Mustafa Kur), a former telecom worker from the less affluent and besieged Damascus suburbs, gives us the sum of his life in days—10,749 to be precise.

From Berber village to indie haven: Arts festival brings Algerians together
Ait Ouabane was chosen to host this year’s Raconte-Arts, Algeria’s most popular indie travelling festival. The event's 14th anniversary was packed with countless outdoor shows with free access. Thousands of people flocked to the picturesque city, home to pastel-coloured villas that adorn the landscape.

Release of Araweelo Abroad Issue 03
The arrival of the third installment of Araweelo Abroad marks the online magazine’s continued commitment to showcasing the varied experiences of the Somali diaspora.